The romantic view of romance in Western culture says a very small fraction of people would make a great partner for you, customarily one. Some clues suggest that in fact quite a large fraction of people would make a suitable spouse for a given person. Arranged marriages apparently go pretty
its just sample size. yes there are a lot of good matches, but there are more nonmatches than matches. you need to go through bad dates and then bad picks, so its not odd at all to end up still unmatched.
There is also the larger society to think about. The Catholic church (filled with celibate priests) promoted the idea in the middle ages. Folks had other reasons to follow the powerful church and went along. That got the ball rolling.
It's not about seeking an acceptable partner but about falling in love. Falling in love is a quite complex process. The person who are dating might look as an acceptable partner on paper but have the wrong MHC-complex.
The human mating process is prone to error. Even if two people are in principle a good match one of them can make mistakes during the mating process. The mistake can prevent the emotional attachment that's required to occur.
If the mating process fails it's very convenient to be able to say: "You aren't the one for me", instead of saying "You don't belong to the pool of 50% of the population of your gender that make suitable partners for me".
Failure doesn't hurt as much when the chances for success were slim anyway.
The romantic way of love also has other advantages. You don't play power games to manipulate your prospective partner into liking you if you believe in soulmates.You just meet your prospective partner and attempt to discover that you are soulmates instead of trying to force them into a relationship with you.This is a trait that's valuable to signal to prospective partners.
This line of thinking really argues against itself. However large the *hypothetical* pool of *potential* matches may be, most of us only choose one life partner. (Or, for those who have more than one marriage, most people only choose a small number of life partners.)
So, I mean... in practice we only choose one mate. That's about as exclusive as it gets.
Also, dmytryl, you can get the same results for this problematic as from near-far by applying attribution theory (even if you don't think it reduces to construal-level theory). Attribution theory is fad according to no one--it's been investigated for half a century. And, there's no point in deriving and testing predictions if you never apply the corroborated theories.
The simplest explanation: that a rational agent would be willing to put a lot of resources into selection of a long term partner (that is, selection is going to be a hard job, with all associated talk of how special the selected is) because it adds up to huge differences in utility, does not pop up.
I don't think the OP's thesis has any clear bearing on how much time or effort one should put into finding a mate. Some commenters have interpreted it that way, but it's a bad interpretation.
This 'Near-Far' local fad does, something that will look incredibly silly once the forces pushing it go away. It's clearly a game of some kind, trying to use 'only the latest' cognitive hypotheses, and use them the most.
I disagree, of course, owing my own appreciation of construal-level theory to Robin and having applied it to politics ( http://tinyurl.com/88d329b ) and persuasive writing ( http://tinyurl.com/dyqf8jr ). (I have undergone a traditional doctoral and postdoctoral regiimen in social psychology)
It might be useful to look at it as a question of narrative and definition.
If we look at most peoples' "world," it really consists of only a few hundred real people, if that. We have certain circles of friends, relatives, co workers, etc. that we know, and a whole lot of human shaped things we don't really interact with as other people. Past that, there are just faces on TV and pictures that we don't really think of as real people. If we accept that each person's world is really small relative to the actual size of the world, then the notion that there is only one person for us doesn't seem to jarr with reality too much. After all, even among your friends you have favorites and those you like well enough but wouldn't want to spend too much time with. It is entirely possible that out of everyone you currently know there is only one of the appropriate gender that is sufficiently pleasing to be a long term partner.Of course the instances of infidelity later suggest that we at least have interests in testing that conclusion when our social groups grow and change, but short term, and more importantly in societies with limited mobility and social shifts, this isn't as much of an issue.
Such societies, like the relatively near pre-modern societies in the West where most of our culture comes from, generally focused around smaller towns and villages, with fewer truly large and busy cities, and much less mobility. As a result when writers and storytellers created narrative that reflected and informed upon our lives, they wrote about ideas of one true love for each person as it followed not only the general sense of true, but also the cultural ideals of fidelity.Probably a half dozen other things too, but generally I think it is useful to remember that when people say something is unique in the world, they often really just mean their personal world.
The simplest explanation: that a rational agent would be willing to put a lot of resources into selection of a long term partner (that is, selection is going to be a hard job, with all associated talk of how special the selected is) because it adds up to huge differences in utility, does not pop up. (If you want to stick signalling somewhere, one may want to signal honesty in this way).
This 'Near-Far' local fad does, something that will look incredibly silly once the forces pushing it go away. It's clearly a game of some kind, trying to use 'only the latest' cognitive hypotheses, and use them the most. It's always the case with amateur/armchair anything, that the latest fads are the entire base. Armchair physicist will rattle you the reasons why there's many worlds or why dark matter is necessary but would be entirely unable to solve a simplest physics problem predictively. Armchair psychologist, likewise, would rattle a construct of how something works, while being entirely oblivious that the psychology, at last, is about making predictions and testing them - curious combination of the modern (new fads) and old (pre-scientific approach).
"So why does considering a very small fraction of people suitable make you seem good rather than weird?" Well, the romantic ideal is "there's one perfect soul-mate for everyone" rather than "there's one perfect soul-mate for me." By claiming that high standards are proper for everyone, you avoid casting yourself as especially good or weird. The loyalty-signaling explanations developed in other comments still fit, though.
Perhaps the personal lesson for you should be that you probably overestimate the necessity for some requirements--like obsession with saving the world.
Indeed. I would say that an obsession on such things is probably correlated with a narcissistic personality. Maybe Grace should consider reflecting on why she considers such trait attractive.
Here's an application that shows something of the effects of the truncation of romantic candidates in far-mode. A man beseeches a woman and is rejected. "You're not my type!" The man persists and wins the woman. The woman's initial rejection occurred because of her constricted preconceptions.based on her evaluating suitability in far mode. (For this, near-mode seems better. Incidentals are probably more important than fundamentals (my opinion).
{You'll be surprised at how soon you stop caring about saving the world. Or else, you may convert your partner, other factors being favorable.]
Modern western romantic love has raised the standards for a "good" relationship. Traditional societies did not assume that love, respect for one's partner nor fidelity were essential to a good marriage. Indeed, happiness and self-fulfillment were not assumed to be a "right" of married partners. In addition, Western men have to give up many of the deferential privileges that were assumed to be provided by the wife but that women are told they should not provide today. Yet many/most men still want them in some form or another without feeling they have the right to ask for them. Top that all off with anti-male divorce law in a world in which women remain hypergamous and it's not a surprise that it is in fact likely that a "good" match is harder to make than historically.
Perhaps the personal lesson for you should be that you probably overestimate the necessity for some requirements--like obsession with saving the world.
[After all, you've read enough Robin's written to at least question the depth of your own commitment to that project. Is attending graduate school in philosophy (of all subjects) well-suited for world changing? Even more to the point, is writing blog posts making interesting analyses of trivial questions reasonably construed as the effort of one dedicated to change the world?]
There's just all sorts of attempts at least intelligent possible interpretation of what's going on. As well as rather silly expectations of being more right due to not doing anything that may've been deemed wrong with this so called analysis.
I don't think so. There's only a single plausible interpretation of what Katja describes--near-far bias in the form of the fundamental error of attribution.
Now, one can be contrarian and dispute the prevalence or even existence of the described phenomenon: that people tend to conceive the range of potential satisfactory partners as truncated. By since this observation follows from what is the most well-researched bias in all of social psychology, the burden probably falls on you.
Katja is impressively perceptive about social norms and practices, at least those she has experienced. [Perhaps her true calling is sociology-or, better, social psychology, if she likes designing experiments to test her insights.] But problems solved by a simple application of principles are more suitable for an academic exam than discussion.
The relevant problem with the OB crowd, in my opinion (having tuned LW out) isn't an assumption of irrationality but of hyperrationality. Signaling, after all, is rational behavior, even though it tends to be economically inefficient. Most commenters have jumped for the most plausible-sounding signaling explanation, although a different explanation more clearly applies; although in fact we signal just the opposite. The bottleneck isn't in signaling but in brain limitations--that aren't the affirmative product of adaptation.
its just sample size. yes there are a lot of good matches, but there are more nonmatches than matches. you need to go through bad dates and then bad picks, so its not odd at all to end up still unmatched.
There is also the larger society to think about. The Catholic church (filled with celibate priests) promoted the idea in the middle ages. Folks had other reasons to follow the powerful church and went along. That got the ball rolling.
never mind...
It's not about seeking an acceptable partner but about falling in love. Falling in love is a quite complex process. The person who are dating might look as an acceptable partner on paper but have the wrong MHC-complex.
The human mating process is prone to error. Even if two people are in principle a good match one of them can make mistakes during the mating process. The mistake can prevent the emotional attachment that's required to occur.
If the mating process fails it's very convenient to be able to say: "You aren't the one for me", instead of saying "You don't belong to the pool of 50% of the population of your gender that make suitable partners for me".
Failure doesn't hurt as much when the chances for success were slim anyway.
The romantic way of love also has other advantages. You don't play power games to manipulate your prospective partner into liking you if you believe in soulmates.You just meet your prospective partner and attempt to discover that you are soulmates instead of trying to force them into a relationship with you.This is a trait that's valuable to signal to prospective partners.
This line of thinking really argues against itself. However large the *hypothetical* pool of *potential* matches may be, most of us only choose one life partner. (Or, for those who have more than one marriage, most people only choose a small number of life partners.)
So, I mean... in practice we only choose one mate. That's about as exclusive as it gets.
Also, dmytryl, you can get the same results for this problematic as from near-far by applying attribution theory (even if you don't think it reduces to construal-level theory). Attribution theory is fad according to no one--it's been investigated for half a century. And, there's no point in deriving and testing predictions if you never apply the corroborated theories.
dmytryl,
The simplest explanation: that a rational agent would be willing to put a lot of resources into selection of a long term partner (that is, selection is going to be a hard job, with all associated talk of how special the selected is) because it adds up to huge differences in utility, does not pop up.
I don't think the OP's thesis has any clear bearing on how much time or effort one should put into finding a mate. Some commenters have interpreted it that way, but it's a bad interpretation.
This 'Near-Far' local fad does, something that will look incredibly silly once the forces pushing it go away. It's clearly a game of some kind, trying to use 'only the latest' cognitive hypotheses, and use them the most.
I disagree, of course, owing my own appreciation of construal-level theory to Robin and having applied it to politics ( http://tinyurl.com/88d329b ) and persuasive writing ( http://tinyurl.com/dyqf8jr ). (I have undergone a traditional doctoral and postdoctoral regiimen in social psychology)
It might be useful to look at it as a question of narrative and definition.
If we look at most peoples' "world," it really consists of only a few hundred real people, if that. We have certain circles of friends, relatives, co workers, etc. that we know, and a whole lot of human shaped things we don't really interact with as other people. Past that, there are just faces on TV and pictures that we don't really think of as real people. If we accept that each person's world is really small relative to the actual size of the world, then the notion that there is only one person for us doesn't seem to jarr with reality too much. After all, even among your friends you have favorites and those you like well enough but wouldn't want to spend too much time with. It is entirely possible that out of everyone you currently know there is only one of the appropriate gender that is sufficiently pleasing to be a long term partner.Of course the instances of infidelity later suggest that we at least have interests in testing that conclusion when our social groups grow and change, but short term, and more importantly in societies with limited mobility and social shifts, this isn't as much of an issue.
Such societies, like the relatively near pre-modern societies in the West where most of our culture comes from, generally focused around smaller towns and villages, with fewer truly large and busy cities, and much less mobility. As a result when writers and storytellers created narrative that reflected and informed upon our lives, they wrote about ideas of one true love for each person as it followed not only the general sense of true, but also the cultural ideals of fidelity.Probably a half dozen other things too, but generally I think it is useful to remember that when people say something is unique in the world, they often really just mean their personal world.
>srdiamond
The simplest explanation: that a rational agent would be willing to put a lot of resources into selection of a long term partner (that is, selection is going to be a hard job, with all associated talk of how special the selected is) because it adds up to huge differences in utility, does not pop up. (If you want to stick signalling somewhere, one may want to signal honesty in this way).
This 'Near-Far' local fad does, something that will look incredibly silly once the forces pushing it go away. It's clearly a game of some kind, trying to use 'only the latest' cognitive hypotheses, and use them the most. It's always the case with amateur/armchair anything, that the latest fads are the entire base. Armchair physicist will rattle you the reasons why there's many worlds or why dark matter is necessary but would be entirely unable to solve a simplest physics problem predictively. Armchair psychologist, likewise, would rattle a construct of how something works, while being entirely oblivious that the psychology, at last, is about making predictions and testing them - curious combination of the modern (new fads) and old (pre-scientific approach).
"So why does considering a very small fraction of people suitable make you seem good rather than weird?" Well, the romantic ideal is "there's one perfect soul-mate for everyone" rather than "there's one perfect soul-mate for me." By claiming that high standards are proper for everyone, you avoid casting yourself as especially good or weird. The loyalty-signaling explanations developed in other comments still fit, though.
Perhaps the personal lesson for you should be that you probably overestimate the necessity for some requirements--like obsession with saving the world.
Indeed. I would say that an obsession on such things is probably correlated with a narcissistic personality. Maybe Grace should consider reflecting on why she considers such trait attractive.
Here's an application that shows something of the effects of the truncation of romantic candidates in far-mode. A man beseeches a woman and is rejected. "You're not my type!" The man persists and wins the woman. The woman's initial rejection occurred because of her constricted preconceptions.based on her evaluating suitability in far mode. (For this, near-mode seems better. Incidentals are probably more important than fundamentals (my opinion).
{You'll be surprised at how soon you stop caring about saving the world. Or else, you may convert your partner, other factors being favorable.]
Modern western romantic love has raised the standards for a "good" relationship. Traditional societies did not assume that love, respect for one's partner nor fidelity were essential to a good marriage. Indeed, happiness and self-fulfillment were not assumed to be a "right" of married partners. In addition, Western men have to give up many of the deferential privileges that were assumed to be provided by the wife but that women are told they should not provide today. Yet many/most men still want them in some form or another without feeling they have the right to ask for them. Top that all off with anti-male divorce law in a world in which women remain hypergamous and it's not a surprise that it is in fact likely that a "good" match is harder to make than historically.
Katja,
Perhaps the personal lesson for you should be that you probably overestimate the necessity for some requirements--like obsession with saving the world.
[After all, you've read enough Robin's written to at least question the depth of your own commitment to that project. Is attending graduate school in philosophy (of all subjects) well-suited for world changing? Even more to the point, is writing blog posts making interesting analyses of trivial questions reasonably construed as the effort of one dedicated to change the world?]
A near-far analysis suggests asymmetry: "they" tend to see the incidental factors that ended up allowing "them" to be satisfying to their partners.
There's just all sorts of attempts at least intelligent possible interpretation of what's going on. As well as rather silly expectations of being more right due to not doing anything that may've been deemed wrong with this so called analysis.
I don't think so. There's only a single plausible interpretation of what Katja describes--near-far bias in the form of the fundamental error of attribution.
Now, one can be contrarian and dispute the prevalence or even existence of the described phenomenon: that people tend to conceive the range of potential satisfactory partners as truncated. By since this observation follows from what is the most well-researched bias in all of social psychology, the burden probably falls on you.
Katja is impressively perceptive about social norms and practices, at least those she has experienced. [Perhaps her true calling is sociology-or, better, social psychology, if she likes designing experiments to test her insights.] But problems solved by a simple application of principles are more suitable for an academic exam than discussion.
The relevant problem with the OB crowd, in my opinion (having tuned LW out) isn't an assumption of irrationality but of hyperrationality. Signaling, after all, is rational behavior, even though it tends to be economically inefficient. Most commenters have jumped for the most plausible-sounding signaling explanation, although a different explanation more clearly applies; although in fact we signal just the opposite. The bottleneck isn't in signaling but in brain limitations--that aren't the affirmative product of adaptation.